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SWAT is usually only involved when it's clear there is an immediate and present danger. So of course they are going to be ready with weapons drawn. Do you want

• cjbprime 9y ago
  This claim is obviously untrue. (I suppose you're hedging with "usually", but even that seems unlikely.)
• y7 9y ago
  > when it's clear there is [...] danger Shouldn't they at least verify for themselves whether there is actual danger?
  • wldcordeiro 9y ago
    Yeah considering that the 911 call mentioned a 1 floor house and the house in the video is 2 floor they should have had some idea it wasn't quite right.
  • tomschlick 9y ago
    How? Are you going to send an officer to the door to ask someone if there is a murder going on? This was a bad shoot, but the tactics were sound. Don’t correctly they would have called him out of the house from a distance with lethal cover from multiple angles and then cleared the house.
    • rbetts 9y ago
      If sound tactics get innocent people killed when nobody was under actual threat --- those are shitty tactics.
      • tomschlick 9y ago
        Tactically, what would you do different? You cant send people up to the door, as you have to assume the person is telling the truth and has the means to shoot through the door at them. When someone has a gun, distance and cover are your friend. You then get everyone you can out of the house so you can clear it and assist the victims. That is what any police force in the civilized world would do if they had what they thought was credible information about a murder / hostage situation. Obviously pulling the trigger in this case was a mistake, but what do you do differently? Everyone is criticizing training in this thread but no one seems to have any real solutions.
        • anigbrowl 9y ago
          How about asking the guy on the porch some questions? Like 'what's your name? Do you have any weapons? Did you call 911?' It seems not to have occurred to you (and a lot of other people) that yelling commands at people is not an effective way to handle many common situations.
• rbcgerard 9y ago
  Simple question - what % of SWAT encounters should an INNOCENT person be able to survive?
  • trophycase 9y ago
    I dunno? Maybe 99.9% or even 99.99%
• hungerstrike 9y ago
  Why not make sure that there is some danger first instead of just going off of an anonymous phone call? Seems pretty simple, just stand outside the house with the megaphone and say “hey what’s going on in there”?
  • solipsism 9y ago
    The militarization of the police force precludes this. Whatever's in the house is Al Quaeda, and our hero boys in blue are here to frag some shit. /s
  • falcolas 9y ago
    At which point, if you're up against armed individuals, you've lost the element of surprise, and have created a hostage situation at best, and a shootout in a suburban neighborhood at worst. Or, someone walks out and defuses the police, then their compatriots wipe all the police out unopposed.
    • debaserab2 9y ago
      This mindset is exactly what's wrong with policing in America. Every single part of training seems to be designed for worst case scenarios. There's no room for common sense or judgment.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • blt 9y ago
        Because if you consider average case scenarios, logic will inevitably force you to make a choice: what percentage of cops should die during their career? The police chiefs decided the answer is zero. That leads to extreme aggressive tactics. Too bad the owners of mines, oil rigs, logging operations, etc. don't share a similar concern for their employees' lives.
        • valuearb 9y ago
• tacomonstrous 9y ago
  If any rando can call in a 'dangerous situation', then yes, they should be more circumspect. There is just no excuse for killing an innocent civilian. It's outrageous. Response to the parent's edit: These are supposedly trained officers who acted with absolute incompetence leading to a completely needless death. How is one supposed to empathise with this? It's a complete and utter fuck-up.
  • hinkley 9y ago
    Someone here is trying to increase the consequences for killing suspects and they had a rep from the police union arguing against it because it could have unintended consequences like “people dying”. I ended up yelling at my radio, “PEOPLE ARE ALREADY DYING!” What the rep meant was cops dying. But the statement, as worded, makes it sound like cops don’t consider the rest of us to be people. Which is exactly the thing a lot of Americans are terrified is actually true. In the end I expect he made the case for the people arguing for bigger penalties.
    • chickenfries 9y ago
      Too many cops see the people they interact with as criminals. They know that they interact with innocent people sometimes, but they are heavily biased towards thinking that by the time they are interacting with you, it is very likely that you're a criminal. And it's their job to protect "society" from "the criminals." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line
• otterley 9y ago
  Sure, but you’re assuming that the clarity has been established. That threshold needs to be met, and it certainly didn’t happen in this case.
• grey-area 9y ago
  SWAT is usually only involved when it's clear there is an immediate and present danger. That is demonstrably false. For reference, start with this case.
  • meri_dian 9y ago
    Police were responding, in this case, to a call made by someone claiming to be armed and holding his family hostage. You do not assume a call is fraudulent in a situation like that. You assume the worst. What happened to the civilian is a tragedy. He should not have been killed. But the person most at fault here is the one who lied and called in SWAT in the first place.
    • Silhouette 9y ago
      You do not assume a call is fraudulent in a situation like that. You assume the worst. We're talking about literally a life or death situation here. Why on earth would you assume anything, rather than being cautious and trying to confirm for sure what the situation actually is?
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    • 7952 9y ago
      The worse outcome is that the innocent bystander is killed. That could be a hostage, or some random person caught up in a hoax. The whole point of the police presence is to protect that person. In this situation they failed in that objective.
    • StavrosK 9y ago
      > But the person most at fault here is the one who lied and called in SWAT in the first place. It completely mystifies me how people can think that people with guns were justified in fatally shooting someone with no guns. That kind of thing should just never happen, either subdue them or let them get away, why are you shooting them? What could they possibly have done, short of ran to the kitchen to get a knife and then ran back and tried to stab someone? How can you mistake anything someone unarmed does for a deadly threat?
• adamnemecek 9y ago
  If nothing else, they fuck up addresses all the time.
• alkonaut 9y ago
  There is just one way this isn’t a massive police screwup, and that’s if the person SWATed reacted in a way that was (very) threatening, such as grabbing a gun, or something that is reasonable the police could believe was a gun. My hunch here is that, just like you are suggesting, Swat teams are used incorrectly as first response in unconfirmed situations. No investigation by anyone has confirmed the threat. At the end of the day, police officers just can’t shoot unarmed people, no matter how stressful the situation.
  • oh_sigh 9y ago
    What kind of investigation would you suggest take place before hand about a situation where there is supposedly a person with hostages who has already killed one?
    • rbetts 9y ago
      A situation that doesn't include the "supposedly" qualification you make. A single anonymous source on a non-911 number without corroborating reports of gunfire is not sufficient cause to shoot a man on his porch. Here's an idea -- fly a drone around the house and look in some windows. Knock on a neighbors door and ask if they heard a gunshot. Establish the identity of the reporter - how does the reporter know what is happening? Is the reporter physically proximate to the area?
      • oh_sigh 9y ago
        > A single anonymous source on a non-911 number without corroborating reports of gunfire is not sufficient cause to shoot a man on his porch. No one is arguing that. > Here's an idea -- fly a drone around the house and look in some windows. Knock on a neighbors door and ask if they heard a gunshot. That sounds great. Until there is an actual hostage situation, and police waste their time doing this and a hostage is killed, at which point people will be asking why they didn't kick the doors down if they knew someone was being held in there. > Establish the identity of the reporter - how does the reporter know what is happening? Is the reporter physically proximate to the area? The reporter claimed to be the person who killed his father and was holding other people hostage. How would you confirm if the reporter was physically in the area? E911 includes location reporting, but this can be spoofed(I don't know if it was in the situation)
• CalChris 9y ago
  In this case there was no immediate and present danger yet SWAT was called in. There was a report which turned out to be false. The SWAT team also was under no danger when they shot this guy. I should add that being a police officer is not a particularly dangerous job. A telephone lineman has a dangerous job. A garbage man has a dangerous job. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-dangerous-jobs/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-dangerous-jobs/
  • oh_sigh 9y ago
    The fact that there are jobs with higher injury rates out there doesn't make policing not dangerous.
  • briandear 9y ago
    I am going to strongly disagree. Being a cop is extremely dangerous — just because more cops don’t get hurt doesn’t mean it’s less dangerous. We can probably agree that being a race car driver is dangerous despite there not being a large number of injuries. Training and equipment mitigate some of the effects of the danger — but that doesn’t make it less dangerous. Spend a night doing a police ride along in a major city, then report back on just how “not dangerous” the job is. To be clear, I am not defending the cops in this situation, merely disputing the ridiculous claim that being a cop isn’t particularly dangerous. How many garbage men have been killed on the job by their customers or targeted specifically because of their job? Any snipers taking out garbage men? Any garbage men getting routinely assaulted on the job?
    • ncallaway 9y ago
      "I am going to strongly disagree with well established statistical evidence" usually isn't a strong starting point for an argument. > How many garbage men have been killed on the job by their customers or targeted specifically because of their job? Why does this matter? Dead is dead. If you're more likely to be killed or injured doing that job, why does it matter how it comes about?
• Silhouette 9y ago
  It's sad to see how many people here view police as the bad guys Apparently they just killed a totally innocent man, entirely avoidably. In this case, they are the bad guys.
  • hinkley 9y ago
    This will not be the first case of questionable use of force people have encountered. If you think the venom around this case is about this case then you’re going to be confused.
• qaq 9y ago
  Let's cut the BS US Military is facing unimaginably more dangerous situations on daily basis yet expected to obey engagements where rule often is do not fire unless fired upon. Police is not even in the top 10 list of dangerous professions in US. Situations that in most countries are handled by few police officers in US are handled by paranoid SWAT teams on armored vehicles with assault rifles in full tactical gear.
  • tomjakubowski 9y ago
    Police gunfights are typically at much closer range than the military’s. Soldiers have more armor and are often already in fortified positions when fired upon. The situations aren’t exactly comparable. Granted, combat troops probably have superior training to police.
    • qaq 9y ago
      I am not advocating for police to have a rule that disallows them to fire first. But police officers should be capable of acting cool under pressure and to use lethal force as a last resort not as a first tool to be used in any situation. I'd favor the rule that police should be filled with Army vets that have actually being on deployments and can keep their cool in an adversarial situations. There are plenty of footage of real firefights both involving police and Military in 80% of situation police looks like they are scared out of their mind and are acting purely out of being in uncontrollable fear which is a horrible situation.
    • hyperpape 9y ago
      These are SWAT teams. They often have military gear (http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/04/small-town-cops-get-armored-vehicle-its http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/04/small-town-cops-get-armore...). If the problem is that they don’t have enough armor, let’s get them it.
    • dsego 9y ago
      This was across the street. Is that close? You can barely make out the victim in the body cam footage.
• yosamino 9y ago
  > when it's clear there is an immediate and present danger. And that makes sense. There are certainly situations where it's neccessary to subdue everyone in the room and ask questions later. The problem is here > when it's clear The whole subgenre of "SWATing" works, because SWAT teams are being deployed based on dramatic, but unsubstantiated information, on the suspicion of a dangerous situation. This does not help protect officers saftey. It endangers them, and it makes police officers into the tools of criminals. That can't be a good system.
• FireBeyond 9y ago
  > The amount of willful ignorance displayed on HN regarding law enforcement is staggering. Speaking as someone in Fire/EMS who has friends who are on SWAT teams, and as someone who has personally trained with SWAT teams for active shooter situations, going into unsecured scenes to remove patients while under the cover of law enforcement... I'm still going to disagree with you, and with the assertion of wilful ignorance. Speaking of which, > when it is clear there is immediate danger It evidently wasn't that clear. Even when I go to a structure fire, one of the confirming criteria is "multiple callers". To be clear, "one of", not deciding, or otherwise.
• rabboRubble 9y ago
  I have moderate sympathy with police for the difficulties of their job. If they find it uncomfortable or find themselves unable to handle the rigors, like the rest of us in society, they can get a new job that is better suited. When it comes to police shooting people, I have little sympathy. They are the only class of people in society who can kill and under most circumstances, face no real consequence for their actions unlike the rest of their citizen compatriots. With that privilege comes a greater responsibility in my assessment. I have absolutely zero sympathy for post-shooting employment difficulties police face who have, unlike nearly the rest of society, union protections and can not be terminated at will. When my employment circumstances are equal to a police officer, either by at-will provisions being extended to that class of citizen, or by me having access to a union of equal effectiveness, will I have one iota of sympathy for cops who find scrutiny too hard to bear. Police officers are free to do like the rest of us and find a new job.
• Balero 9y ago
  This was not a dangerous situation. They should not have had their weapons drawn.
• empath75 9y ago
  It’s almost as if the USA isn’t the only country on earth and other developed countries manage to have police forces that don’t murder their own citizens regularly.
• anigbrowl 9y ago
  it's clear there is an immediate and present danger (probably) dangerous Pick one, because, those two situations are actually quite different. willful ignorance displayed on HN regarding law enforcement is staggering Or maybe some of us are fully aware of that and simply don't agree with your point of view.